Full Name
Tom Cochran
Job Title
Advisor
Company
Fmr. White House, State Dept & The Atlantic
Speaker Bio
Tom Cochran is an executive advisor to a small number of C-suite leaders and growth-stage operators facing discrete, high-stakes decisions on AI adoption, technology, and organizational change.
The challenge is usually technology, growth, or organizational change. The actual problem almost always lives upstream of that. He is called in when the risk of getting the decision wrong is high, and the risk of not deciding is higher.
His work is grounded in the people, process, and culture questions that technology alone cannot answer. He has written on these questions for the Harvard Business Review and Entrepreneur, and his research on the hidden costs of institutional communication is cited in Cal Newport's Deep Work.
Cochran served as a presidential appointee at the Obama White House, where he oversaw the digital infrastructure of WhiteHouse.gov and co-created We the People, the first citizen petition platform of its kind.
At the U.S. State Department, he led a 140-person team and a $40 million effort to modernize the digital infrastructure of every U.S. mission abroad, a project planned for four years that finished in fourteen months.
He later served as Chief Technology Officer of The Atlantic, leading the modernization of a 160-year-old institution before the industry understood why it mattered. Earlier in his career, he was the first engineer at Blue State Digital, the firm that powered $1.2 billion in grassroots fundraising across two presidential campaigns.
He has delivered keynotes and briefings for leadership audiences in more than 20 countries, including the New Zealand Parliament, the Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and ad:tech Tokyo.
Cochran is a graduate of Vanderbilt University.
The challenge is usually technology, growth, or organizational change. The actual problem almost always lives upstream of that. He is called in when the risk of getting the decision wrong is high, and the risk of not deciding is higher.
His work is grounded in the people, process, and culture questions that technology alone cannot answer. He has written on these questions for the Harvard Business Review and Entrepreneur, and his research on the hidden costs of institutional communication is cited in Cal Newport's Deep Work.
Cochran served as a presidential appointee at the Obama White House, where he oversaw the digital infrastructure of WhiteHouse.gov and co-created We the People, the first citizen petition platform of its kind.
At the U.S. State Department, he led a 140-person team and a $40 million effort to modernize the digital infrastructure of every U.S. mission abroad, a project planned for four years that finished in fourteen months.
He later served as Chief Technology Officer of The Atlantic, leading the modernization of a 160-year-old institution before the industry understood why it mattered. Earlier in his career, he was the first engineer at Blue State Digital, the firm that powered $1.2 billion in grassroots fundraising across two presidential campaigns.
He has delivered keynotes and briefings for leadership audiences in more than 20 countries, including the New Zealand Parliament, the Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and ad:tech Tokyo.
Cochran is a graduate of Vanderbilt University.
Speaking At
